


Bitch.

by Ehiel



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: I wish I had had time to make this longer, M/M, Oblivious Bucky, Pining Tony, Winteriron Holiday Exchange, kind of, winteriron
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 21:58:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5472131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ehiel/pseuds/Ehiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James was the first to fall, finding the anomaly that was Tony Stark breath-taking and stimulating all at once. But Tony was too much for James, deserved better than James, and James was content to fantasize.</p><p>So when Tony began to feel the same, he doesn’t notice. At all.<br/>--<br/>In otherwords, a drabble in which Tony two mechanical babies find love. Kind of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bitch.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for the Winteriron Holiday Exchange 2015! I'm so glad to have gotten to participate and to my lovely recipient, I hope you like this! (By the way, I was so excited to read that you liked David Bowie. Man is my jam.)
> 
> Anyways, enjoy the fic!  
> \- Ehiel

It’d taken some time for Tony to come to terms with it. Come to terms with him. He hadn’t been subtle about it either, from the way he would flat out ignore any of James’ attempts at contribution to conversation, opting to talk over him or very childishly ask, “Sorry, did anyone hear anything?” to more overt questionings of why James was allowed with them, a murderer and a fiend, why he was allowed anywhere near them. He couldn’t help it. He was afraid. He was afraid of the man that killed his parents, the man that seemed to shower twice day, on a clock, but still in Tony’s eyes was tinged red with blood. The same tinge Tony saw when he looked at himself. So perhaps that was it, when it came down to it. Tony couldn’t stand James because in James he saw himself.  
  
Confused, anxious, and covered in the blood of those they had had a direct hand in murdering.  
  
But Tony’s smart and with time, he does come to tolerate having Barnes around, to even look forward to the banter they pass between them only on a rare occasion, but nothing more, nothing less. Barnes was a teammate and Tony would cooperate where it was necessary. That was the end of that.  
  
Well, he supposed that would be the end of that, if Steve hadn’t taken their slightly less hostile relationship to mean that they would be acceptable partners on the mission at hand. Tony would give his left arm to not be trapped in this collapsed cave, in the middle of a desert, with James Buchanan Barnes. Alright, okay, maybe he’d give, like, a leg or something, perhaps the arm would be in poor taste. Really, he’d give anything not to be trapped in a cave at all. Not again.  
  
“Fucking hell!” Tony huffs, his suit disengaged and stood in the corner of their small area of cave, providing enough light from it to keep them from utter darkness. He’s been clawing at the walls, trying to decipher a way out for twenty minutes now, while James sits, unmoving, in the corner. “Are you even good for anything?” He finally snaps, turning his attention on James and as soon as it’s out of his mouth he thinks better of it, but tension is coiling in his shoulders and his hands are starting to shake. Panic.  
  
“Keep messing around and the whole thing’s gonna collapse on us. The team knows where we are. When the fight is over, they’ll work on getting us out.” James had gotten very good at taking Tony’s berating, indulging a fight only when they both felt equally as pissy. “No use in digging.” That doesn’t sit well with Tony, who’s beginning to take shorter, shallower breaths, pacing in the short distance the space allows.  
  
“No use in digging!” Tony answers, exasperated. “There’s always use in digging! What? I know you’re used to sitting on your ass and letting others make your decisions for you, but I’m not!”  
  
“Do me a favor, Stark, and shut the hell up.” James says, his tone a bit colder, sharper, and his eyes warn against further pressing. On a normal day, Tony would recognize this kind of look, answer with something snippy, and then leave it be, for both of their benefit. But this wasn’t a normal day and these weren’t normal circumstances, so he does what he does best. He lunges for the throat, the heart, makes stabs that would deter the average person from talking to him anymore, disgust them away from conversation in a childish attempt at self-preservation.  
  
“What? You think you can shut me up with a look? I’m not one of the team, I’m not some HYDRA lackey, you don’t scare me. You’re programmable, morally ambiguous. I’ve built computers with a stronger sense of integrity and self-preservation than you!” Tony yells and James recognizes immediately what the other is doing, the reason and the state of the genius, but it doesn’t make his words any more tolerable.  
  
“And I’ve met HYDRA agents with more poise and respect than you.” James hisses back. “You’re nothing but an over grown man-child with a twisted view of right and wrong and an inherent need to destroy yourself as some sort of punishment for the man you’ve been!” Tony opens his mouth to protest and James stands. “I’m not finished!” He yells and Tony stops, entire body one tense line. “You verbally abuse and distance yourself from everyone who might give a shit about you! Why? You want to know what I think? Because you’re afraid. Because you’re afraid of someone else seeing the monster of a fucking person you are and everything you’ve done! But not just that, you’re afraid of someone caring about you anyways. Because you don’t feel like you deserve it. You don’t feel like you deserve to be happy. And you feel like everyone else deserves better. So you hide behind mock contentment and an unjustly inflated ego and you hope that everyone will look past the fact that you’re a god damned wreck and you want desperately for someone to put you back together.” In the silence that follows James’ tirade, the air is tense, and Tony looks shocked, and for one of the very few times in his life, speechless. He stands where he is, shoulders shaking, looking terribly small in the confined area. “I know, because I’m the same way.” And in that moment, they understand each other, to some extent, and all the boiling, bubbling tension breaks the surface and dissipates.  
  
“I can’t breathe.” Tony doesn’t have any more response than that, feeling now able to be vulnerable as James has already accurately laid him bare and, for the first time, Tony can begin to see James as a human. Not a machine, not a murderer, not a convict. And he thinks, perhaps wistfully, that in learning not to see James this way, he could learn not to see himself the same. “I can’t breathe.” Now that he’s not worried about facades and protecting himself, his full attention is narrowed to the panic constricting his chest, the all too familiar feeling of being trapped in a cave in a place that no one might care too look. At least this time he already had a magnet in his chest.  
  
“I know.” James answers, nodding a little, watching as Tony sinks down against one of the dust-reddened walls, his knees pulled to his chest. “I know.”  
  
\--  
  
Two weeks after James and Tony had been retrieved after their two days spent trapped in that cave, the pair seem almost amicable. Jokes run through the team behind their backs about what exactly happened in that cave, but no one asks and the pair certainly don’t tell, but in the end everyone decides it’s for the best.  
  
But Tony, Tony knows what happened in the cave. Two days of gentle tones and comforting words without any of the usual pity or panic that comes with it, a night too hot for most of their clothes though neither of them were willing to bear any skin until the heat truly turned unbearable, a subsequent day where they dance around questions. The scars around James’ shoulders, some of them are from James’ blunt nails digging into the skin in nightmarish panics, trying to detach it, claw the foreign object away.  
  
The scars around Tony’s reactor, some of them, are from the same.  
  
“You know, you haven’t eaten anything in nearly twenty four hours. That’s against your dietary plan, Mister.” The tone is mocking, playful even, and Tony doesn’t have to roll out from under his current project, a DB5 (which he was working on as a result of the past three team movie nights being Bond movies, per Natasha’s request), to answer.  
  
“And what business is my dietary plan of yours, lug nut?” Tony answers, reaching up to tighten a connector when he’s being forcibly rolled out from under his metal goddess. He’s greeted by James, foot between Tony’s legs on the creeper, holding up a bag of fast food, at which Tony raises a brow. “And that _is_ part of my dietary plan?”  
  
“You want it or not?” Tony’s tempted to be difficult, but it smells so god damned good. He sighs, and when James offers down a hand he takes it with enough ease to surprise even himself, standing to his feet.  
  
“What’d you get?”  
  
“Cheeseburgers.”  
  
“ _Bitch._ ” Tony answers excitedly, snatching the bag and heading over to one of the cleared off work benches, shoving some stuff off it and hopping up to sit. It’s only once he’s not heard any sort of back handed compliment usually characteristic of James’ visits that he looks up, to see a confused and almost offended looking James. “What?” Tony says around a mouth of burger.  
  
“You called me a bitch.” Oh. Oh. Right. Forties. Not down with the slang. Not hip with the lingo. Christ, Tony, pull yourself together.  
  
“No, I used the term bitch in your direction.”  
  
“And that’s different…?”  
  
“Completely.” Tony is met with even more confusion, but slightly less agitation, but he takes that as a good sign. “Think of it more as excitement. Or like… gratitude, I guess. Like, replace it with something less vulgar. Like if you’d presented this glorious piece of fat saturated cow carcass—“ James pulls a face. “Sorry. Anyways, imagine it like I’d answered with _bro_. See?” It’s clear James doesn’t get it completely, but he seems to get it enough not to harbor any more ill will, coming over towards the workbench to grab his own cheeseburger from the sack. The pair eat in what to James isn’t that horrible a silence, but to Tony is a catastrophe in which his over active mind positively goes crazy. He doesn’t like silence, when he can help it, but James isn’t talking (and also isn’t leaving) and Tony doesn’t really have anything to say, which just makes it that much more difficult for the genius. So when James finally breaks the silence, Tony is more than thrilled.  
  
“So, I had a question.” He sounds unsure of himself, causing Tony to raise an eyebrow to prompt him on. “My, uh… they used to calibrate my arm, every couple of weeks. Make sure everything was working, slick and sliding, that sort of thing.” Tony bites back an innuendo. “Obviously been a while, since I’ve had it properly calibrated. I’ve done what I could myself, but I was wondering if you’d… take a look?” Tony chokes on his cheeseburger. A pat on the back and a long sip of Pepsi later and he’s grinning like an idiot.  
  
“Is this Christmas?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Never mind. I’ll do it.”  
  
\--  
  
Three weeks later, Tony and James sit in the middle of the lab floor, surrounded in dozens of holograms not only with calibration specs but with Tony’s wistful potential improvements and ideas, which he yammers on about for what he doesn’t realize is three hours, over excited and to his surprise, uninterrupted. When he’s finally run out of words, he looks to James, a bit nervous that he’d lost the other somewhere along the way. What he’s met with instead is a look he doesn’t think he’s ever gotten, one of amazement and amusement and astonishment all at once.  
  
And when James grins and answers with a, “ _Bitch._ ” Tony laughs.  
  
\--  
  
The subsequent weeks are filled with meetings, and James harbors a new appreciation for Tony Stark. The man is brilliant, everyone knew that, but James got to see the extent of his genius, as he practically pulled the arm apart and put it back together. But not only that, James got to see his determination, his precision, and the couple of times James would break down at the sound of a drill or the feeling of decompression within the metal casing, he saw Tony’s innumerable patience. James was the first to fall, finding the anomaly that was Tony Stark breath-taking and stimulating all at once. But Tony was too much for James, deserved better than James, and James was content to fantasize.  
  
So when Tony began to feel the same, he doesn’t notice. At all.  
  
\--  
  
It was incredible, the speed with which James drank in information. He got drunk off Tony’s tech the way Tony got tipsy off a good whiskey and it was incredible to see. At first, Tony gives a middle school textbook explanation of most of his work, of what he’s doing, to answer James’ frequent questions. But it’s soon that he realizes that James is not only asking for, but _wanting_ more complicated answers and before long, Tony’s prattling on at every inquiry at a pace that could make most professors’ heads spin. James listening, which is impressive all on its own, but he’s keeping up and when he doesn’t, he asks for Tony to repeat himself until he understands. It’s refreshing. Hell, its fun. And that little look James gets when something clicks sends sparks down Tony’s spine. It takes him what seems like an eternity to realize that his life has become a cycle of waking up, doing the necessary business, meeting up with James, and at some point reluctantly having to withdraw to sleep. His schedule revolves around James fucking Barnes.  
  
Fuck.  
  
\--  
  
Steve is the first of the team to notice a change in Tony’s behavior, perhaps because he knows him so well, and as soon as he does notice he’s consulting Natasha. Tony’s not only being amicable to Bucky, he’s seeking him out, they’re _hanging out_ , which Nat points out could just be friendly, but Steve knows Tony. Tony isn’t friendly like that. Tony’s friendly in the same way a cactus is friendly. Both things stand around and make a nice spectacle, but if you get too close, Christ you’re gonna regret it. But Tony would bump Bucky’s arm in passing or slap him on the arm when telling some new story or grab him by the wrist and drag him towards the lab if he was in a particularly science-y mood.  
  
And that was only the start of it.  
  
Tony was leaving things around. _How do you know?_ Nat had asked and Steve had answered that he and Bucky shared a room. There wasn’t a lot the guy did that Steve didn’t know about and receiving all kinds of little things from Tony was a thing he definitely knew about. The first thing had been relatively simple, running shoes that Bucky had explained away by saying that he had mentioned to Tony he’d needed a new pair. Next was the watch. Not just any watch, mind you. Steve was sure that Bucky didn’t realize that damn thing likely cost more than his and Bucky’s possessions combined, but again Bucky had ridden it off as an inside joke about both of them always being on different schedules, one or both of them always a little late or a little early. But the last one, the last one was what threw Steve off. He’d come back to the room to find a new set of sketch pencils, watercolor markers, and a new sketchbook sat on his bed. _From Tony,_ James had said, _guess he must have gotten tired of me complaining that you didn’t treat yourself enough to good supplies_. To not only go so far as to offer so many things to Bucky, but to people Bucky loved just because their unhappiness made him unhappy, that was downright unheard of for Tony. A consensus was quickly reached.  
  
Tony was schmoozing Bucky and Bucky was _completely_ oblivious.  
  
\--  
  
As was the nature of volatile things, it was inevitable that all of this come to a head. But no one expected it to happen the way that it did. Aliens were always messy business, with their strange tech and seeming disregard for physics, but the team was holding pretty well, following formation and doing as they were told by the Cap and Stark when Cap was indisposed. It was when a particularly brutal blow to the back of Tony’s suit had him crashing to the ground the all hell broke loose.  
  
“Stark, respond!” Cap’s voice sounds over the com and when no response meets him, he’s not fast enough to stop James from sprinting the opposite direction, towards Tony’s known location. Calling after him or even stopping him would be futile, Cap knew that, so he puts the rest of the team into action securing the location, leaving James to handle Stark.  
  
When James finally gets to Tony, the other has rolled out of his suit, back-down in the dirt clutching at his chest, his arc reactor shorting out and sputtering at Tony bangs his hand against it to try and get it back down in its casing (and back against its connection points), his vision goes red. Tony’s bleeding from the head, losing the will to slam down against the reactor, beginning to sag against the dirt. James is there in an instant, asking forgiveness for what may hurt, before shoving the heel of his metal hand down into the reactor. Tony gasps as it settles back into its casing (at least well enough to survive until Tony could fix it), but before James can say anything, he feels a swing of a weapon collide against his left arm, sending him sprawling. The alien settles itself over Tony, lifting its long, metalloid spear--  
  
Before he can bring it down, Cap’s shield comes crashing in, splitting the alien’s terrible head from its miserable shoulders, sending its body and head twitching to the ground beside Tony. But it’s not Cap who’s thrown it, but James, having been tossed it as the team neared, notified their barrier had been breached by a sole straggler, most of the rest of the aliens fended off.  
  
“Get your hands off my boyfriend.” James hisses as an afterthought, staggering back one step to catch the shield that comes ricocheting back to him of the rock it had collided with. The whole teams stands in silence, only to be broken when Tony sits up on his elbows, confused and staring at James.  
  
“I don’t know whether to be aroused or confused.” Seeming to come down from his brief streak of particularly violent violence, James smiles a little, looking back at Tony.  
  
“What?” James answers, tossing the shield back Steve’s way before walking over to Tony and offering him a hand. “Don’t think an old guy like me can catch a hint?” A moment’s pause.  
  
“Steve tell you?”  
  
“Yep.” James laughs and Tony rolls his eyes, taking James’ offered hand to aid in standing to his feet.  
  
“ _Bitch._ ”

**Author's Note:**

> I really wish I could have made this longer. I may go back and do so. What do you guys think? Let me know if you'd like to see more of this/ more like this in the comments below! Much love to you!


End file.
